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Introducing Dissident Muse
Post #1921 • August 9, 2022, 2:29 PM
From my interview with Elizabeth Johnson, February 2021:
Consider this: excepting the artists themselves, what we call the art world ultimately consists of four kinds of entities, museums, galleries, schools, and magazines. My proposition is that a robustly decentralized art world is going to blur those four categories, in some cases utterly. At that point maybe a curator is a collector. Maybe a dealer is a journalist. And so on.
So, to what do the four entities reduce? I don’t have an answer to this....
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have an answer to this that I'm calling Dissident Muse.
Right now the main URL is just a pretty thing I made in Javascript, and a logo. There is also a storefront, for the purpose of selling Aphorisms for Artists. But I'm going to bump the edition numbers of Comics as Poetry and Cloud on a Mountain and move them under Dissident Muse as well. The next time I do something like the Maenad Suite it will go there too. I'm interested in representing the work of like-minded others in some form as well. I describe it this way:
Dissident Muse fosters opportunities for creation, publication, exhibition, and education by artists who love beauty and freedom.
Publication, exhibition, and education: that's to what the entities reduce. Creation is where the artists come in. And if you have a problem with beauty and freedom, good luck with your thing while we do ours.
Dissident Muse also has a Substack, which is part of its publishing aspect. I hemmed and hawed about this ever since Substack approached Jerry Saltz about leaving New York Magazine for his own spot on the site, and he declined. At that point I thought, Saltz thinking this is a bad move must mean that it's a great move. Nevertheless I have a nice spot of real estate on the internet here at Artblog.net and I don't want to give it up.
But yesterday, another Substack publication that will soon publish my lastest asked me to create an author profile and I thought, what the hell. Because I've seen more than one platform disappear in my long years on the internet, I'm cautious about archiving my work on other people's servers. But Substack makes a great product and has enticing features, particularly a commenting mechanism that I don't have to write myself. So I'm not sure what the relationship will be between Dissident Muse and Artblog.net, and I'm open to suggestions on the matter from my regulars.
Speaking of my regulars, I imported my Artblog.net subscription list to the Dissident Muse Substack, so you're already signed up if you receive those alerts. I apologize in advance if you don't want to get similar alerts from Substack; feel free to unsubscribe from them, or let me know to take your name off the list before the next post goes up. Technically, the Artblog.net content management system is like an old wrench, which does one thing like a champion and never disappoints. Mailchimp has become like on old drill which has started to drive unpredictably and produce a burning odor. Producing new posts at Artblog.net requires me to compose in XML but I'm used to it. Mailchimp is a hassle, and its UX designer is, I believe, being paid in cocaine.
Of course if you're not the recipient of the Artblog.net email alerts you should go check out the first Dissident Muse post and hit Subscribe.